The Idiot at Home Part 17

"What impudence!" cried the Poet.

"Only the ardor of youth," observed the Idiot, calmly. "Put yourself in the same place. Suppose that you, just as you were about to declare your undying love for the girl of your choice, and while gently stealing your arm about her waist, were to have the back of your hand ripped off by a brutal hedge?"

"I see," laughed the Poet. "I dare say I should be indignant."

"They were properly so," said the Idiot, "properly so; and neither Mrs.

Idiot nor I really blamed them."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'HOLDING UP A GREAT OSAGE ORANGE'"]

"We let the matter rest, and made no complaint," he continued. "Time went on, and the courters became a trifle more a.s.sertive. One of them came into the house one evening and demanded to know what I meant by a.s.saulting him and his lady friend, holding up a great Osage orange which he alleged to have been the murderous weapon I had used; and I really had to apologize, for I was guilty. It happened that while walking about my small preserves I had picked up this orange, which had fallen onto my lawn from a tree on Jimpsonberry's place, and had unthinkingly tried to see how far I could throw it. It went just over the hedge, and had unceremoniously knocked Strephon's hat into the middle of next week and frightened Phyllis into hysterics. I was placed on the defensive, but for the life of me I couldn't help laughing, with the result that Strephon stalked angrily away, alleging that I should hear from him further in the matter."

"And did you?" asked the Poet.

"No," said the Idiot, "I never did; but the incident rather soured me towards the people who seemed to regard my stone wall as their property.

I even came to feel like purchasing a gatling-gun and loading it with Osage oranges for the purpose of repelling them, but even under this provocation I still continued to ignore the matter."

"You are too easy-going," suggested the Poet.

"I was," said the Idiot, "until they began to use the sidewalk that runs parallel with the wall as a tablet upon which to inscribe in letters of flame their undying affection. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Idiot and I started for church, we were horrified to find our flagstones scribbled all over with poetry, done in chalk, after the order of

"Roses is pink, and violets is blue, Sugar is sweet, and so be you.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'THE PICTURE OF A HEART WITH AN ARROW DRAWN THROUGH IT'"]

"Further along was the picture of a heart with an arrow drawn through it, and the two names 'Larry' and 'Mame' written on either side. And one unusually affectionate youth had actually cut the initials of his young lady and himself in the top of the coping, with a cold-chisel, I suspect. It's there yet. It was then my spirit rose up into fierce denunciation. That night, when the clans had gathered and were going through the initial stages I marched out in front of them, cleared my throat ostentatiously, and made a speech. It was the most nervous speech I ever made; worse than after-dinner speaking by a good deal. I called their attention to how I had suffered: referred pathetically to the destruction of the hedge; inveighed sarcastically against the Osage-orange man; told them in highly original fas.h.i.+on that worms, if taken at the ebb that leads on to fortune, would surely turn and rend their persecutors, and that I'd had enough. I forgave them the hedge; I forgave them the annoyance they had cost me, but I a.s.serted that I'd see them all condemned to eternal celibacy before I would permit my sidewalk to be turned into an anthology of love, and my coping into an intaglio of eternal blessedness. I requested them if they wished to write poetry to write it upon their own hearths, and if they had any inscriptions to cut to chip in and buy an obelisk of their own and hieroglyph to their hearts' content. I even offered to buy them each a slate and pencil, which they might bring with them when they came, upon which to send their sentiments down to posterity, and I finished with what I consider to be a pleasing perversion of Longfellow's poem on the Woodman, with a few lines beginning:

"Scribbler, spare that sidewalk.

"Then I departed, threatening to have them all arrested."

"Good!" said the Poet. "I didn't think you'd ever do it. You have nerve enough, but you are too good-natured."

"I wasn't good-natured then," said the Idiot, regretfully; "and when I got through I stalked back into the house, scolded Mollie, sent Tommy to bed, and behaved like a bear for the rest of the evening."

"And the people on the wall? They slunk away in despair, I suppose,"

said the Poet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'IT TOOK MY HIRED MAN TWO WEEKS TO SCRUB IT OUT'"]

"Not they," said the Idiot; "not by a long shot. They combined against me, and next morning when I started for town I found my sidewalk in worse shape than ever. One flag had written upon it the pleasing mandate 'Go drown yourself.' Another bore the mystic word 'Chump' in great capital letters, and at the end of my walk was a pastel portrait of myself, of rough and awkward composition, labelled with my name in full.

It took my hired man two weeks to scrub it out. And on the following Hallowe'en they strung a huge banner on my telephone wires, inscribed 'The Idiot Asylum,' and every blessed gate I have to my name had been removed from the premises."

"What an outrage!" cried the Poet.

"Not a bit of it. Merely a suburban ebullition," said the Idiot. "They don't mean anything by it. They are mere children, after all, and from their point of view I have interfered with their rights."

"And you propose to stand all this?" asked the Poet. "If I were you I'd get a pile of broken bottles, as they do in England, and place them along the top of that wall so that they couldn't possibly use it."

"Brutal custom, that," said the Idiot. "May do for Englishmen; won't do here at all. In the first place, it spoils the appearance of the wall; in the second place, it is not efficacious; in the third place, it would place me in a false position. Everybody'd soon be asking where I got all those bottles. An Englishman drinks enough beer in the course of a week to keep his walls covered with broken bottles for a century. I don't, and I'm not going to buy bottles. I've got a better scheme."

"Ah!" cried the Poet. "Now we are coming to the invention."

"Merely an extension of my 'Hired-Man-Discourager,'" said the Idiot.

"Simple, and I trust efficacious. I am going to put a live wire along the coping of my wall. Broken bottles are cheap, my dear Poet, but they don't work. If I put broken bottles on my wall the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Wooers would meet on my lawn and pa.s.s resolutions against me, and ultimately they would demand the use of my parlor, unless I misunderstand their nature.

"The lovers' rights must be respected always, and I'm truly thankful that they have stopped short at my frontage. When they operate along my frontier-line they are harmless, interesting, even amusing. If they carry their principles through and penetrate beyond the edge, why, then Mrs. Idiot and I will have to give it up.

"My scheme is to make them feel that they are welcome to the wall, but to make the wall--well, to give an element of surprise to the wall. Just as Jimpsonberry's man is soon to be surprised electrically, which is legitimately, so do I propose to surprise these inconsiderate persons who cut down my hedges, who scribble up my sidewalk with their poems, and who hang Hallowe'en banners on my telephone wires. I wish them all well, but next spring when they attempt to revive the customs of the past they will find that even I am resentful."

"But how?"

"I shall have a wire running along the coping, as I have already said, that between the hours of eight and twelve p.m. will be so full of shocking things that my uninvited guests will cease to bother me. Can you imagine the effect of a live wire upon ten loving couples engaged in looking at the moon while sitting on it?"

"Yet you claim to insist upon their rights as lovers," said the Poet, deprecatingly.

"Certainly I do," said the Idiot. "Man has a right to make love wherever he can. If he can't make love on my wall, let him make love somewhere else."

"But where?" cried the Poet. "Your swains up here have no home, apparently."

"Or Jimpsonberry's wall," said the Idiot. "By the way, do you know anything about moths?"

XIV

SOME CONSIDERATION OF THE MOTH

"Do you know anything about the habits of moths?" repeated the Idiot.

"Moths?" echoed the Poet, eying the Idiot closely, the transition from live wires to moths proving rather too sudden for his comprehension.

"No, I don't know anything about moths except that I have heard that they are an unmitigated nuisance."

"They are worse than a nuisance," said the Idiot. "They are a devouring element, and they are worse than fire. If your house catches fire you can summon an engine and have it put out, and what damage it does you can collect for if you are careful enough to keep your possessions insured; but with the moth it is different. There isn't any moth department in town that you can ring up, nor is there a moth-extinguisher that you can keep close at hand to fight them with.

Furthermore, there is no moth-insurance company here or elsewhere to protect the man who suffers damage at their teeth, that I know of.

"He is a mean, sneaking, underhanded element, the moth is. Fire has a decent sense of the proprieties. Moths have none at all. When fire attacks you it smokes, and crackles, and hisses, and roars, and lets you know in clarion tones that it has come. The moth steals upon you in the dead of night, and chews up your best trousers, gorges himself upon your wife's furs, tickles his palate with your swellest flannel golf-s.h.i.+rt, munches away upon your handsomest rug, punches holes in your best sofa-cus.h.i.+ons with his tusks, and then silently folds his tent and steals away without so much as a thank-you for his meal. For unmitigated meanness commend me to the moth!"

"You seem to speak with feeling," said the Poet, with a smile. "Have you suffered?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'AN UNPAID GROCER'S BILL BECOMES AN ABSOLUTE PLEASURE'"]

"Suffered?" cried the Idiot. "Suffered is not the word. They have tortured me. Alongside of the moth and his nefarious work even a book-agent pales into insignificance, and an unpaid grocer's bill becomes an absolute pleasure. You can meet a book-agent on his own ground, for you know his limitations. I have done so myself. Only yesterday one of them called upon me to sell me a Cyclopedia of Cookery, and before he got away I had actually sold him a copy of your poems."

"Ah," said the Poet, shaking his head. "You sold my gift, did you?"

"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot. "When your book came out I bought a copy, and two days later you sent me another with an inscription, which I treasure affectionately. I sold him the one I bought."